The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. — L. P. Hartley

If you’ve ever been to Richmond, Virginia, you’re familiar with Monument Avenue. It’s a street lined with statues that mark a tragic epoch in American history — an epoch that finally came to an end yesterday.

Today, Richmond is an American city like any other. But 147 years ago, it was a rebel capital, the nerve center for a nation of millions extending from the Atlantic to the Rio Grande, united in arms to achieve one aim: retaining the right to own human beings as property based on the color of their skin.

In that, they failed. But it took four years of total war and hundreds of thousands of lost lives for the issue to be resolved; and even though the war ended with the rights of African-Americans explicitly affirmed in the Constitution, this affirmation prompted such resistance in the conquered Confederacy that even a decade of military government could not stamp it out.

Eventually, both sides were so exhausted that they reached a sort of under-the-table agreement — the South would accept the authority of the United States, and the North would turn a blind eye as the South erected new laws (the “Jim Crow laws”) to roll back the rights African-Americans had won. Those laws stood on the books for nearly one hundred years, shutting black Americans off from the culture at large by shunting them into segregated ghettos.

Because most of the statues on Monument Avenue are of Confederate military and political leaders — Robert E. Lee, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis — it’s easy to think that it’s memorializing the rebellion. But it is this latter era, the Jim Crow era, that Monument Avenue really memorializes. The statues on Monument Avenue didn’t begin to go up until 1890, a full twenty-five years after the Confederacy breathed its last. By the time Monument Avenue became Monument Avenue the rebellion was a dusty memory, held onto only by an ever-shrinking group of aging veterans.

So why erect the statues at all? What purpose was served by memorializing the leaders of a defeated rebellion — leaders whose armies were crushed and whose institutions had been consigned to history?

The statues are not about the real Confederacy. They mark instead a Confederacy of the mind — a new generation taking up once again the cause that their forefathers had fought and died for. They were a symbol of defiance, an open taunt to African-Americans in Virginia and across the United States that no matter what the laws said, their “rights” were mere illusions, words on paper unsupported by society at large. They were a marker laid down to affirm to the world that while slavery may have been stamped out, the slave-owner’s worldview was alive and well — and this time, it was backed up by all the civil institutions of the land. There would be no new Emancipator, the statues shouted, no new armies in blue; this time, now and forever, their fate would be to live at the mercy of their masters.

Such was the environment in which African-Americans lived and died for nearly a century after their emancipation from bondage; such was the atmosphere in which they evaluated the promises made to them by America.

Of course, all that came to an end with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King showed the way to overthrow Jim Crow and the slave-owner’s worldview once and for all. And in the decades that followed, one by one, the doors of opportunity were finally opened to them.

All but one.

Last night, as the American Dream Candidate, Barack Obama, won the Presidency of the United States — won it, through grit, smart strategy, and hard work, with no special shortcuts granted or asked for — that last door, so long closed, finally swung open. And now, we as a nation will walk through it — together.

Once upon a time, the statues on Monument Avenue were ominous warnings to all those who would speak of the equality of man that such ideas held no sway in the United States, despite what the laws said; they were disrespect made physical, wrought in bronze and placed on a pedestal.

Today, though, they are relics, leftovers of a bygone age. They signify nothing beyond the habits of mind of generations long passed, habits that once were commonly accepted but now are seen for what they are — divisive, poisonous, shameful. And now, we take the next step towards putting those habits behind us, once and for all.

147 years ago, Richmond was a rebel capital, the nerve center for a nation of millions extending from the Atlantic to the Rio Grande, united in arms to achieve one aim: retaining the right to own human beings as property based on the color of their skin. But now it’s an American city like any other. And yesterday, 79% of its residents voted to make Barack Obama — a black man — the next President of the United States.

History moves slowly. But it does move.

Photo by Flickr user Dogwood Dell; used by permission under terms of Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license.